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British Columbia aboriginal communities using technology to bring endangered languages back from the brink

Ktunaxa is a language facing extinction with less than 20 fluent speakers still living. But technology is helping keep their voices alive for future generations.

Dorothy Alpine is one of fewer than 20 elders who can speak the Ktunaxa language fluently. She is working as a language teacher to help preserve the indigenous language.

By Jennifer PagliaroStaff Reporter

Fri., May 4, 2012

Can you say “good afternoon” in Ktunaxa?

Truth is, very few people can.

In the Ktunaxa (pronounced ‘k-too-nah-ha’) nation — covering 70,000 square kilometres of territory in southeastern British Columbia and traditionally parts of Alberta, Montana, Washington and Idaho — it’s estimated less than 20 people can fluently speak the indigenous language, making it one of the world’s more critically endangered.

But youth and elders working together across the nation’s four communities of less than 1,500 people living mainly in southeastern British Columbia are experimenting with new technology to preserve and catalogue language as a cultural cornerstone for future generations.

Marisa Phillips, 23, was working with First Voices, an online repository of aboriginal languages, when a woman came into the office to ask how she could use her 15-year-old listen-and-learn Ktunaxa cassette tape on her new MP3 player.

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So Phillips built her own website using built-in software on her Mac computer to publish podcasts of the digitally converted files for others to download.

Since then, First Voices has independently archived 2,500 words and 1,114 phrases in Ktunaxa, with Phillips and others recording new digital audio files of elders and cataloguing them online.

“My generation and our parents now, I’d say, are very concerned about the language,” Phillips said. “Mainly because I think we’re having to grasp it at a later age.”

But tools like First Voices are trying to re-engage the younger generation. In March, an iPhone app for the Ktunaxa First Voices files and several other aboriginal language banks were released on iTunes.

Many within the community attribute the loss of language to the legacy of forced assimilation in federally run residential schools that operated in Canada for more than a century.

“Some of our elders these days are hesitant to speak the language,” Phillips said. “Back then it was beaten out of you.”

For elders who managed to maintain their language skills, many are out of practice with so few speakers, and many are now dying off — and the language with them.

“Our language is critically endangered,” said Melanie Sam, director of the traditional knowledge and language sector at the Ktunaxa Nation Council. “It is very scary.”

Ktunaxa is what linguists call a language isolate, which means it is unique in its composition, with no ancestral link to any other language in the world.

“Once the language goes it’s gone,” Phillips said.

She said some elders still debate the language’s complexities. Southern-lying bands, for instance, in regions where apples were readily grown, had several words to differentiate between red, green and golden varieties, while northern communities used one word, meaning “little red.”

But there’s no time for arguing, Phillips said. Given the dire situation, she and others are in a rush to preserve whatever they can while they can.

Across Canada there are nearly 60 individual aboriginal languages in 11 language families, with more than 30 of them in British Columbia alone.

Today, only 25 per cent of the aboriginal population countrywide can speak or understand an aboriginal language, but not fluently, according to Statistics Canada. Those numbers continue to dwindle, with mother-tongue speakers of endangered languages like Ktunaxa pushing into their 50s.

At two reserve schools, Ktunaxa is part of the curriculum and in other communities external language classes are offered. But a lack of core funding and teachers makes maintaining classes difficult, Sam said.

She said the goal is to catch children at a young age, when their brains are still developing, to teach fluency.

“If we can’t produce a fluent speaker in the next 10 years, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to revitalize our language,” Sam said, beginning to choke up.

Even though a written system was developed in the late 1970s, the language — characterized by back-of-the-throat glottal stops and unique stresses on syllables — was traditionally passed down orally

The community is now looking at tools like Skype to host language-learning sessions from a distance. And the nation council is using video to document culturally significant activities with English and Ktunaxa subtitles.

In his book, When Languages Die, linguist K. David Harrison wrote, at the current rate of extinction, “we stand to lose a language about every 10 days for the foreseeable future.”

In 2001, there were 6,912 languages spoken worldwide, he noted. By 2101, that number would be cut in half.

Lorna Williams, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Knowledge and Learning and associate professor at the University of Victoria, said the loss of language is about more than one less way of speaking.

“All the accumulated knowledge that people who speak this language have and can share, and can learn from, and can build from, would disappear,” she said. “Your sense of who you are, your sense of your connections to your ancestors, to your environment, to your land, to the place where you put your feet would also disappear.”

Williams said support from the federal government has been sporadic at best.

“Communities just can’t count on it,” Williams said. “It’s amazing what they’ve been able to accomplish with so little.”

The Department of Canadian Heritage operates project-based funding under the Aboriginal Languages Initiative.

But Sam said the government splits money from these initiatives between dialects instead of language families, which means fewer funds to go around. The council has set up a charitable account to draw funds for revitalization.

In B.C., the First Peoples’ Heritage Language and Culture Council, the group behind First Voices, is a provincial Crown corporation supported through funding.

But Williams agreed more support for languages was needed in order for them to survive.

“Our languages were born on this land,” she said. “I think it’s important for all Canadians to value the First Nations’ languages of this country.”

Ktunaxa phrases:

Good afternoon – ki?su?k kyukyit

What did you learn today? – Qapsin kin ?upxa nawsanmiyitki?

What is your name? – Ka?kin ?a•qak?ik?

I am tired – hu n?uk?ukni

Good evening – ki?su?k kwa?kwayit

? = palatal clicks

? = glottal stop

Aboriginal languages in Canada by the numbers:

• More than 1 million people identified themselves as aboriginal in a 2006 census.

• 29 per cent of First Nations people could speak an aboriginal language well enough to carry on a conversation in 2006.

• 20 per cent of off-reserve First Nations children aged 2 to 5 were able to understand an aboriginal language in 2006.

• 98 per cent of off-reserve First Nations children who understood an aboriginal language could also understand a non-aboriginal language (English or French).

• In 2001, 125 people on Ktunaxa reserves had knowledge of aboriginal languages. By 2006 that number was 100.

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